Developing countries have a problem: roughly 20% of the world’s population lacks access to electricity, and kerosene lamps are both dangerous to the environment and hazardous to health.

GravityLight, whose motto is “Doing more with less,” has come up with a clever new way to bring light to poverty-stricken rural areas–without electricity. The lamp operates on gravity, by using the falling motion of a weight to one side to generate light. It began as a project on IndieGogo, and launched in 26 different countries. Now, after crowdfunding almost $400,000 (that’s 727% of its original goal funded), the company is releasing a redesign, which includes a sturdier, less breakable shell, a lighter weight, and a new pulley system.

Best of all, the lamp only costs $20, but will provide free lighting to families all over the world. This proves valuable in places that are generally without electricity, or “off the grid,” or too poor to pay for it. Not to mention that it conserves natural resources, which is always a plus.

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative design that helps move the world forward.

Forsman & Bodenfors wants to make sure drivers “drive 25 to keep kids alive,” and they’ve found an ingenious way to do it. Talking GPS are standard features in modern vehicles, but the agency has conceptualized an app that will switch the voice on the GPS to a child’s when within range of a school, daycare, or other area populated by children.

It’s currently available in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and comes pre-loaded with all schools and daycare centers in the Nordic region.

The agency hopes that this will serve as an audio reminder to drive carefully and watch for children, reducing the number of accidents in school zones and other kid-friendly areas.

What Sparks Our Fire: Using innovation and unconventional problem-solving to draw attention to an often-ignored safety hazard

Vaccination has been a highly controversial topic in recent years, resulting in a slew of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the School Vaccination Law in California, which mandates that children that attend public school must be vaccinated.

British Columbia’s ImmunizeBC and agency Rethink Vancouver have teamed up to create a unique mailing campaign to promote vaccination, appropriately called “Viral”. The trailer for the campaign states that “Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet, but as you know, it’s making a comeback.”

However, the kicker is the actual mailing campaign: when exposed to sunlight, the UV-responsive ink on the paper appears suddenly in a rash of bright red spots, reminiscent of–you guessed it–measles. The alarming card shows how fast measles can spread, and reminds recipients that “not vaccinating your children puts us all at risk”.

This comes after particularly alarming reports of measles spreading throughout the United States, including an outbreak at Disneyland, and reminds parents to vaccinate their children or risk them being a public health hazard.

What Sparks Our Fire: Ingenious campaigns that post important public health reminders

Sustainability has been a growing trend in business for years now as climate change becomes a more prevalent threat, however, now technology companies especially have realized that sustainability is a good investment.

Sustainability “ensures business continuity by conserving resources,” and now more than ever, economic and environmental sustainability are vital to businesses’ longevity and productivity.

In 2014, Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that climate change-related natural disasters are costing Unilever at least $300 million a year. To combat this, several companies have come up with ways to conserve energy and other natural resources.

Creating environmental products is one such step. Samsung, for example, has taken the lead and released a solar-powered laptop, as well as three “green” mobile phones made of corn starch bioplastic and have energy-efficient chargers and recyclable packaging.

In order to ensure the future of the planet–and technology–it’s up to other companies to follow in Samsung’s small carbon footprints.

What Sparks Our Fire: Companies taking on a greater accountability for their sustainability and making moves to make sustainability a universal practice.

The next step for global connectivity? A smartphone for the developing world. And it’s designed by none other than John Sculley, former Apple executive and Robert Brunner, the designer behind Beats by Dre headphones.

The Obi Worldphone marks a greater push toward accessible technology–Sculley aims to provide developing countries in places like Africa and Southeast Asia with high-powered, affordable smartphones, which he predicts will replace their needs for personal computers.

In addition to its sleek design, the phone is tailored to its target consumers’ preferences. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, texting, taking photos, and banking are popular uses for smartphones, so the Obi Worldphone has features like a 13-megapixel camera and a diverse marketplace of applications.

The phone will retail for $200, a reasonable price to most first-world Americans, but still may be a problem for the standard income in a developing country.

What Sparks Our Fire: A quest for a high-powered but inexpensive smartphone that makes technology more available on a global scale.

Sha Yao, an industrial designer, was volunteering in a local senior care facility, and noticed that patients with dementia had difficulty eating independently, due to the mental and physical restrictions of the disease. Normal silverware and flatware was too challenging to use, and so inspired by the problem and her grandmother’s developing Alzheimer’s disease, Yao designed Eatwell. Eatwell is an easy-to-use line of plates, bowls, and eating utensils specifically crafted to make eating cleaner and hassle-free.

The project also won first prize at the Stanford Center of Longevity design contest for its clever product design: dementia patients are often confused by food that is the the same color as their dishes, hence the blue color of the insides, and the cups have low centers of gravity to prevent tipping.

Yao has since launched an Indiegogo campaign for the product, raising over $92,000 to date.

Although manufacturing issues have pushed delivery dates back, order should be back on schedule in a couple of months. Pre-orders are available on the Indiegogo campaign page.

What Sparks Our Fire: Inventions that help Alzheimer’s and dementia patients with simple, everyday tasks

“Living Things

The exhibit, which features a kitchen, living room, and a dining room, envisions a future in which the designers, Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier, envision “photosynthetic furniture,” or pieces that contain glass vessels of algae. These vessels are wired to heat and light, which causes the algae to grow, making them a source of oxygen.

This living, breathing display is not the first that has used algae as a material; however, the designers say it could become more common in the future, because the liquid suspension of the organism makes it malleable and therefore easy to manipulate.

What Sparks Our Fire: Designers harnessing the power of nature to create homes that homes that boast both aesthetics and sustainability.

The creators of the Blitab, a new “haptic tablet,” are bringing new meaning to the word “touchscreen.” Designed to be a Kindle for the visually impaired, their device allows users to actually feel their electronic devices.

The device works like an e-reader with a few major changes. Instead of using an LCD display that users can read off of, the “haptic tablet” uses “smart liquid” that forms bubbles on the surface. Blind and visually impaired users can than read the bubbles as Braille letters. “We call the materials ‘tixels’ from ‘tactile pixels’ because we do not use any mechanical elements to trigger the dots,” says Bitlab’s founder, Kristina Tsvetanova. The software converts text from webpages and USB drives.

Tsvetanova has a working prototype and is still looking to get seed-funding to bring her product to market. And while similar products already exist with astronomical price tags of over $15,000, Tsvetanova’s goal is to make the “haptic tablet” more affordable, so that more people can use it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative design improving internet accessibility for the blind and visually impaired in the tablet-era.

With a majority of Americans and people worldwide that consider solar power to be their number one choice of energy, SunPort is introducing a new way to use solar energy, with their new innovative and affordable outlet adapter. This portable outlet adapter allows users to power all of their gadgets on clean solar energy. Once plugging in a device into the SunPort, the application will automatically calculate how much power you’re using and quickly give you the option to upgrade to solar energy. Once upgrading, it will automatically purchase solar micro-credits that are provided through a non-profit organization called ReChoice. It’s a more affordable and less cumbersome option than those industrial-sized solar panels.

Due to cost being an issue when purchasing solar panels, the inventor of SunPort, Paul Droege, believes they will eventually offer their customers a chance to upgrade their entire home at an affordable and reasonable cost. This will allow those with high interest to use clean solar energy and help create a demand for more solar production.

The use of solar energy has increased tremendously throughout the years and will continue to grow. Nivea Sun ads, which generated a great deal of praise and attention worldwide, used a similar approach.

What Sparks Our Fire: Making solar power more affordable, more portable, and more accessible to change the way we use energy.

Earlier this year companies took advertising to another level advertisements that dispensed beverages to promote their brand. Using “Dispensing Billboards” Like Coca-Cola and Carlsberg, McDonald’s in the Netherlands took a similar approach and found a way to beat the heat. They created a heat-sensitive billboard that dished out 100 free McFlurry cups to pedestrians walking the city streets.

When temperatures reached extreme levels, the billboard would open up and allow pedestrians to take an empty cup, which they could take to the nearest McDonald’s and get their free McFlurry. Who wouldn’t love to cool down with a treat like this on these hot summer days?

Unfortunately, in order for the panels to open, the thermometer connected must reach a set temperature of 101.48°F, so you might not want to wait around for it.

What Sparks Our Fire: Companies using interactive advertising to cater to their customers and the environment